Chain gang nearing end of line

Doug Pike was just doing his job one day a few years ago when former University of Utah quarterback Alex Smith came seemingly out of nowhere and mowed him over.

Call an ambulance? Police? Lawyers?

Not unless they're friends or family members of Pike's who want to hear a man brag about getting leveled.

"That's my claim to fame," says Pike, a retired banker. "I got flattened by the All-American."

For guys like Pike and Bill Earl — two longtime fixtures on the sideline crew at Rice-Eccles Stadium — getting up-close-and-personal meetings with football players is a workplace risk they've been more than willing to take during the past 43 years as members of the officials' chain gang.

That's just one of the many fond memories the two retiring crew members will take away from their decades of trotting up and down the stadium's sidelines.

Earl, the crew chief, and Pike, his buddy who's been working alongside him for nearly a half-century, are officially retiring from the seasonal part-time gridiron gig they've been doing since Ray Nagel coached the Utes in the early 1960s.

It won't be the same watching the action from the stands, but Earl and Pike admit they're ready to head upstairs. It's time, Earl says, to "pass the stick." The fact that he turns 65 next year and just had his hip replaced — putting him on the injured list to watch games from a sixth-level suite most of this season — made his decision all the easier. Pike is feeling the wear and tear as well.

"It gets hard on the back, knees and ankles," says Earl, a retired teacher. "Let the younger guys have their turn."

They can afford to call it quits now after padding their bank accounts with — oh wait, they worked for free. Well, actually they worked for all the peanuts — or hot dogs and Cokes — their concessions vouchers could buy and a couple of general admission bench seats.

Earl joked that they've been doing it for free for so long, they never thought about asking for money. Funny, the U. never asked them if they wanted any, either.

Despite the lack of paychecks, they've lasted on the sideline with a priceless point of view far longer than any Ute head coach. Heck, they've seen 10 different head coaches and have lasted more years than combined victories during the regimes of Mike Giddings (9-12), Tom Lovat (5-28) and Urban Meyer (22-2). And they've been holding up orange sticks and marking the line of scrimmage and first-down spots almost as long as current 47-year-old coach Kyle Whittingham has been alive.

And they have stories to prove it.